Category Archives: Apple and Tech Stuff

How to use your iPhone 4S and SIRI for online banking and other transactions..

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facebook logo 300x300 How to use your iPhone 4S and SIRI for online banking and other transactions..I realize this tip really applies to using any service (like online banking, facebook, twitter, etc) which offers a way to submit data via SMS text messages, but I found a neat way to use it on the fly with my online banking service. 

Like a lot of businesses, my banking’s online services offer a VERY limited set of transactions that can be completed by simply sending a text message to a prescribed number that is pre-approved via their Web interface.  In other words, your phone MUST be entered in and subscribed to their service by way of their Web site, so only your phone can access your account.

How does this work?

  1. I logged into my bank’s online Web site using several secure passwords and tokens.
  2. I subscribed to the SMS banking service, providing my phone number, carrier, and other secure details
  3. The Web site provided me with their SMS number (usually 5 digits) and a short list of commands like BAL(ance), and TRANS(fer).
  4. On my iPhone 4S, I set up a contact for “Bank” which — as the phone number — contained the 5-digit SMS number provided by my bank.

Now, from anywhere I have phone service, I can raise the phone to my ear (activating SIRI) and say “Message Bank BAL“.  SIRI asks me to confirm, and within just a second or two, my bank answers back with my balance via text message (which I immediately delete from my phone).

Is it secure? Sure.  About as secure as the online Web site as long as I don’t keep the messages on my phone.  The commands available also don’t let me do anything destructive like “send money to hackerX” or “make payment to JoeBlow”.  Otherwise, I need to make the clear disclaimer that I’m NOT a security professional, and you should use these tips at your own risk.

Twitter, Facebook, and others

Like the example above, you can subscribe to similar services inside most social networks, add a new contact (like Facebook) to your 4S, and use SIRI to say “Message Facebook blah blah blah” and it’ll post “blah blah blah” to your status message on Facebook, which is all sorts of wicked cool..

While I hate the idea of wasting my limited text messages every month to do this, at least with iMessages, you could theoretically avoid such a charge.

UPDATE: I have to do a little more testing, but with the recent outages in SIRI processing, you might need to disable the option to share your Contacts in the iCloud, making them local to your phone.  Something about the time delay between asking SIRI to send a message and the phone having to look up your contact in the cloud seems to be causing an issue.  You can temporarily disable this option in Settings >> iCloud on your iPhone.

 

Apple SIRI Command Cheatsheets – iOS 5.0 – October 2011

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I picked up the new iPhone 4S the other day. Found it useful to create a “cheat sheet” of all the SIRI commands I could find. Thought I’d share it with everyone and ask for feedback/additions if you have or know of any.

iPad USB Port: What’s the big friggin deal?

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apple leather1 300x300 iPad USB Port: Whats the big friggin deal?Ok, so… I’ve got this friend — the same Internet paranoid friend as the “Why do I blog?” article.  He is a fantastic friend.  The kind of guy you rely on, but he — like me — is prone to holding on to jokes that he thinks are funny for far too long, but one of them (at least I think it’s a joke) is starting to get to me.

I bought my iPad on release day.  I’ve never had a moment’s regret for it, as I use the iPad almost more than I do my desktop system.  I blog from it, I code on it, I do pretty much all things computer on it.

I’ve never.  Not one single time, ever had use for, nor missed having a USB port built into the iPad.  I even bought the dongle and have used it exactly once.  Mostly just to make sure it works (and it did) to transfer off some images from the memory card.

This friend — I call him “Bert” though it’s not his name — and I often talk about the iPad when he invariably comes around to his fall-back response “I won’t buy one because it doesn’t have a USB port“.

After all this time, and having the same old argument, I can’t tell if he’s serious, or whether he’s doing it just because he knows it yanks my proverbial chain, but in all the people whining and bitching about the lack of a USB port (not really Bert), I just don’t get it.

Not one single person has given me a real, legitimate, non-BS reason for needing a USB port on an iPad which can’t be handled with the dongle.  I agree.  It *seems* like Apple could have capitulated and put one on it just to make people happy, but I’m more interested in knowing WHY BOTHER?

USB 2.0 is on it’s way out.  USB 3.x uses a different port design which would require a dongle/adapter for most things since 3.x support right now is very scarce for most devices.  The power draw on a USB 2.x device would more than likely kill — or seriously strain — the battery on the iPad.  At a minimum, trying to power a USB 2.x device would shorten the useful battery life by half, which doesn’t really help anyone, so once again, I ask…

Why does anyone REALLY need one, or is it just another reason to hate Apple by those who don’t “get it”???  Someone PLEASE give me a real reason why the lack of a native USB port on an iPad is a legitimate problem…!  Either that, or quitcherbitchen…

My honest ups and downs of loading Mac OS X on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook

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Ok, as promised, I spent almost a week with my new Dell Mini 9 netbook computer.  What I wasn’t quite fully honest about was that it was loaded down with Mac OS X 10.5.6.   I’m not here to give pictures, and promote how to do it.  There are plenty of articles out there for that (see below).

dell mini 9 300x225 My honest ups and downs of loading Mac OS X on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbookAlso, before everyone — and hopefully Apple execs — get upset, somewhere between my youth and today, I’ve become pretty much a staunch supporter of buying and using legitimate software, rather than pirating it like I did rampantly in the 80′s.

For the record, I’m not here to promote doing this, as I agree that the legality of following the articles on the Web for doing so is questionable.

The reason for this article isn’t promotion of “hacking your Dell Mini” but — while admitting it’s certainly possible – unlike most of hackintosh crowd out there, I wanted to share, as well as address some of my great positives, along with my sincere concerns over putting Mac OS X on this thing to make it usable (which I don’t consider Windows to be).

On February 17th, when I decided to buy a Dell Mini 9, I had exactly ZERO idea that it could be loaded down with MacOS X.  No idea of its real capabilities, and little idea of how very useful it would really turn out to be.  I bought it simply to walk from room to room with while occasionally checking IMDB and using ICQ.

It wasn’t until SamsClub.com and their truly screwed up “4 to 6 week wait for delivery” crap that I started investigating my purchase, found the 2 different articles on installing MacOS (see ZDNet and Gizmodo) and I truly became enthusiastic about my purchase.

So, with a looming road trip, and having received the device at 9pm on a Friday night (thanks UPS), I sat up all night installing my ligitimately purchased retail copy of MacOS X 10.5.6, 2Gb RAM module, and 32Gb SSD from Crucial.  I accomplished the install using an 8Gb flash stick, some printed instructions, and a USB CD Rom drive.  The whole install from power on to power off took about 3 hours..  Somewhere along the lines however, I must have missed a step.

I played with it that Friday night until about 4am Saturday morning.  Happy as a proverbial clam, I turned it off, sat it aside, and — since my weekend was firmly screwed for sleep — collapsed into a heap of snoring mass.

Enter Monday morning.  Proudly, I packed the device and its power supply into a Kinko’s paper bag, and took it to work hoping to show it off to my fellow Mac buddies.  I get to work.  Tap the power button on.. “Operating System Not found”…. Crap..

I left work mid day last Monday to prepare for the road trip Tuesday morning. Went home, did about 20,000 loads of clothes while reloading Mac OSX.  This time, making sure to disable the sleep and hibernation features which seemed to have caused the previous failure.

All seems well, good, yes, thank you.  Power down, pack it, the PS, and a Logitech BT mouse in a leather “Padfolio” which serves the purpose well enough for the moment.

Tuesday morning, wheels up for DC.

So.  After a week of on-the-road travel, I have found sincere concerns along with a lot of good things to be said about my experiences (and I presume the experiences of those going the same route) so I thought I’d share you the trouble, or at least point you in the right direction:

The Good:

  • Once the netbook boots and does all its caching of sorts, it’s REALLY, REALLY fun, and infinitely more usable than Windows XP for the average user.  Peppy as all heck, but again, that’s AFTER it does its thing of fully booting.
  • The 9″ size and being 2.5 pounds makes it wonderfully transportable, and the Air Nazis (the TSA) had a lot less bullshit hassle with the netbook in a padfolio than they ever had with the 15″ mac laptop in a thin sleeve.
  • The 32 gigabyte SSD seems to be around the right size.  You could buy 64gb SSD and load Office (maybe) but you really need to examine what the laptop itself is for.  It’s NOT a work replacement, so much as a really convenient way to get small tasks like e-mail and web surfing (and even high-level programming) done on the road.  You can however load OpenOffice and be just as happy.
  • I thought for sure the tiny keyboard would be an issue, but I guess that over the last 8/9 months or so of getting used to the iPhone, using a condensed kb on a netbook wasn’t THAT big of a deal.
  • This little beasty has all of the ports you’ll need for everything EXCEPT firewire video.  3 USB ports (1 more than my mac pro laptop), SD/HDSD capability.. check.  It’s even got an external plug to drive a monitor, but I haven’t yet been that brave..
  • Everything works.  3 hours to install, mostly because of the USB CDROM, but thanks to the Type11 install (see the aforementioned articles) everything from the webcam to audio, to photo booth to Macromedia Fireworks works on it.  As a matter of fact, the only thing I’ve found which doesn’t work is Boot Camp Assistant, but trying to install Mac OS on a PC to run a PC emulator seems kinda moronic doesn’t it?

The Bad:

  • This is *not* a Macintosh computer.  I know a lot of people will disagree with me out of principle, but there are lots of little noticable things, like bootup and overall speed, that simply don’t convey the “Mac feel”.  A Dell hacked to try to make it run Mac OSX does not an Apple make.  I find it difficult to believe that anyone who disagrees with the ideal of this statement has ever truly owned and/or loved their Mac as I do both my iMac and Macbook Pro.
  • Speaking of the bootup times the problem is that start up times can reach 5 minutes or better, and starting programs up can be lethargic.  Reminds me of the old G3 laptop days.  – That being said, part of this may be my fault, as I bought a slower 32gb SSD from Crucial.com because the reportedly “much faster” “Runcore SSD” is not currently available for purchase.  According to tests by other peeps out there, the stock SSD as well as the Crucial.com one is 70MB/sec read, 15MB/sec write speed.  The Runcore SSD is supposedly 80MB/sec read, 40MB/sec write speed.  For the record, I really have zero idea how this compares to standard notebook hard drives.
  • What troubles me about the “Crucial/stock versus Runcore issue” however is that there is apparently only one single dealer in the world for said chips, and all the positive reviews about the Runcore seem to be put out by either relatives, or owners of the same Chinese company that makes them.  Don’t know, but when/if they ever become available, I may have to invest a little bit to find out.  I can always sell either the Crucial or the Runcore on eBay.

In the end, my feelings are this…  If you go the route I did, you’ll end up with a fun, usable little computer that’s good for small tasks provided you’re willing to let it boot up and have patience to let it shut down on it’s own.   In my experience, it’s just about as fast whether you’re running XP (which comes loaded), or Mac OSX 10.5.6 so the operating system you choose is purely a matter of preference.

The resultant machine however is NOT a Macintosh computer, so don’t try and fool yourself into believing somehow or another that it is.

I am pleasantly surprised by the speed and peppyness of the machine once it gets past the limitations of the current, “slower” SSD card, but I don’t know that I’d be all that jazzed about trying to get all my friends to buy one just to put OSX on it.

If I’d had the money to spend (me being cheap is what started this, remember?) I would have just bought one of the refurb 13″ Macbook Airs from apple.com for $999.  I don’t however have that kind of money in this economy and if I did, I might have gone the more well established, non-pro 13.3″ macbook route.

Meanwhile I still had the need for a netbook sized device that I could literally take with me anywhere, which — for all intents and purposes — is exactly what I got.

Rumors have been circulating about the idea of Apple coming out with a netbook in Q3/2009, but that remains to be seen.  Unfortunately I suspect that even if they do (and I sincerely hope they do), it’ll be more in the range of $800 (just like Sony tries to charge for the same features as my Dell), or something equally unobtainable for us broke-ass mortals just trying to get by.

Your call on hackintoshing the Dell Mini 9.  I’ve given you all I know, and even admitted where I might have done things better.  Just don’t go into it thinking you’re “sticking it to Apple”, because the inevitable truth remains, you get what you pay for.

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 – a cursory glance.

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dell mini 9 300x225 Dell Inspiron Mini 9 a cursory glance.After spending weeks looking for a laptop to use at home for under $400, I finally gave up and ordered a Cherry Red, Dell Inspiron Mini 9 from SamsClub.com.  For $254.00 delivered, I got a 9″ netbook with a dual-core 1.6ghz Atom processor, 1 gb of RAM, and 8 gb of Solid State Disk (SSD) that it uses as a hard drive.   It also came preloaded with Windows XP Home SP3, which — for a Microsoft product — is still the best Windows out there for the casual user like me.  I — for the record — loathe Vista with every fiber of my being, as reinforced by my recent experiment with a Dell Studio 540.

Anyway, for a 9″ screened computer which weighs in at around 2.5 pounds, this thing is pretty snappy, pretty cool, and actually usable.  The keyboard, as I’m sure you can imagine, is a bit on the small side for my pudgy fingers, but it’s certainly faster/better than trying to legitimately surf on my iPhone.

So, with the plethora of netbooks out there, why did I choose the Dell Inpiration Mini 9?  There were certainly larger (10″), faster notebooks out there with real 160gb hard drives, but for me, it boiled down to two things:

  1. Price — No one seemed to be able to get near the $245 price tag, unless you counted the president’s day sale direct from Dell, but that one had Ubuntu on it which — in this case — doesn’t really matter when my hopes are finalized (more on that shortly).
  2. Expandability — Unlike the more popular Acer, EeePC or other netbooks (that I could find), the Dell actually encourages expansion by putting a big door on the bottom of the machine which allows easy access to add more memory, bigger SSD storage, bluetooth card, and even a WWAN (3G) card if you’d like.   I already ordered a 2gb RAM stick and 32gb SSD from crucial.com and will probably order 2 more in order to be able to easily jump between operating systems such as Ubuntu, XP, and even maybe, just maybe MacOS X if I get REALLY curious.

As of Tuesday, I’m going on my first road trip with it to DC and will update the blog later with a full “seriously, how usable is a netbook in the real world?” post when I get back (or maybe from the road if I get really, really bored.

Where are the $300 laptops?

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dell mini 9 300x225 Where are the $300 laptops?Ok, everyone flash back to a time seemingly long ago. You know…. Christmas 2008.

As I seem to recall, we were awash with advertisements for sub $400, if not $300 laptops. Sure, they weren’t usually Core 2 Duo machines with the latest and greatest (though I do recall one or two of those slipping through the cracks occassionally).

Insert the fancy Wayne’s World flashback special effect to today and tell me, where have all those deals gone? See? Perhaps bad timing on my part, but I’ve ALMOST decided that I’d like a cheap laptop for carrying through the house to use for everything between cooking, to ebay’ing and imdb’ing before I forget what I was trying to do on the way to my iMac in the computer room.

I’m not talking about needing a full ruggedized, killer game laptop. Just something with decent resolution and a good browser.

Enter the “netbook”. The nemesis of all men with large hands and fat fingers. Seems I can’t turn around without tripping over one, but I still have major concerns. Dell sold their Ubuntu Linux one yesterday for $199 on sale, but that’s with 4GB worth of SSD for a hard drive, and only 1gb of RAM..

“Only 1GB of RAM”. Is anyone out there old enough to realize the amount of irony in that comment versus 20 years ago when computers and the Internet were really in their infancy for the average person?

Anyway, I digress. Windows being what it is, 1GB of RAM simply isn’t enough. I can’t however speak for Ubuntu Linux, so — probably to my chagrin — I didn’t buy one.

Anyone out there know whether the “netbook” has surplanted the reasonably priced laptop forever?

Where are the $300 laptops?

A potential Eureka moment.

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dell mini inspiron 300x226 A potential Eureka moment.Greetings fellow earthlings,

I know I haven’t been around much, what with travel, the holidays, and now a sinus infection that’s got me scrambled, but I have an idea.

In the last month or two, I’ve found myself addicted to Facebook (gee, thanks sis icon smile A potential Eureka moment. ), meaning I forget about everything else and end up over there dribbling away and playing the terribly addictive “games”.

I wouldn’t call them games so much as distractions really, because for the most part they’re no-brainers.

THEN, the programmer in me kicks in and I begin to consider the fact that — to the best of my wanderings — no one has created an Open source version of Facebook/MySpace/etc in CMS fashion.

I’m not talking about cloning Facebook or the others. That would be illegal of course, but building a Content Management System (CMS) engine that has the same appeal and “I’m an individual part of a community” drive as those other more famous sites, then make it available for anyone to run a site on, ala PHPNuke, Xoops, and the other similar CMS engines.

Toss in personal blogging for the members like we do here, and I really think the potential is there to change the world, or at least the face of the Web.

To that end, I believe I may not be posting too much in the near future until I can jot down my ideas and move forward in a way that makes sense for me. Heck, if anyone’s smart enough (or more enthusiastic enough) to beat me to the punch, I’m ALL for it, as it’s less for me to do.. icon smile A potential Eureka moment.

Apple’s new iPhone 3G, coming soon

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Apples new iPhone 3G, coming soonApple’s chief Steve Jobs unveils faster, cheaper iPhone – Jun. 9, 2008

Thanks go out to a new-found bud over at “The Shameless watching of TV” blog who got me interested in the iPhone. Since my Motorola PEBL is already dying a quick and horrid death after only two years, I had made up my mind yesterday that I was going to pull the proverbial trigger (complete with swap to AT&T) when quite serendipitously a new “3G” version was announced yesterday.

“Twice the speed, half the cost” is the rallying cry from Apple with the new versions tallying in at $199 (8GB) and $299 (16GB) respectively. The new phones, still apparently tied to AT&T’s wireless service will be released July 11th, and I’ve made up my mind that I’ll just have to bite the bullet and grab one ASAP.

Going Mac…..

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apple leather1 300x300 Going Mac.....Ok…. That’s it. I’m going Mac and hell or high water, I ain’t looking back…

Recently, my PC had started experiencing major problems (again) — most likely due to the number of USB devices I had installed. When trying to fix it, Microsoft Windows started complaining that it was no longer licensed. Sigh…

To that end, I have gone Mac. iMac with OS X 10.4.8 actually, but it’s still very very cool. I have never used a Mac before, but the fact that it took me 8 minutes to take it out of the box, hook it up, and be on the net (as opposed to 4+ hours with the PC) is just the start…

If you haven’t seriously looked at a Mac, seriously. Look at a Mac. I think you’ll be surprised.